“All the King’s Men” by Robert Penn Warren: How did USA’s first Poet Laureate write poems, and what does it imply for interpreting his novel?

Robert Penn Warren, multiple award-winning poet, novelist, and literary critic, said that he would often get a new poem while exercising, because he found that the repetitive motion was “like hypnosis—it frees your mind. So when I am walking or swimming, I try to let my mind go blank, so I can catch the poems on the wing, before they can get away…The best parts of a poem always come in bursts or in a flash…You can labor on the pruning, and you can work at your technique, but you cannot labor the poem into being” (1, p. 118). That is, he heard the best parts of a new poem—which had evidently been composed by, and were being spoken to him by, an alternate thinker in his head—and quickly wrote it down.

His novel, All the King’s Men (1946), started out as a verse play ten years earlier. For the novel, Warren wondered “who could tell the story?” He chose a nameless, minor character from the verse play to be the first-person narrator and protagonist of the novel. The nameless character was now Jack Burden. And “the first morning I sat down with pencil and paper to write the novel, Burden started talking” (1, p. 87). Warren evidently wrote down what he heard Burden say.

I have just begun reading the novel, and the most famous character, Willie Stark, is introduced as a man of many speaking voices:

“But he was saying…In his old voice, his own voice. Or was that his voice? Which was his true voice, which one of all the voices, you would wonder…and the voice was different now…and it was another voice…” (2, pp. 15-16).

People with multiple personality may have different speaking voices, because each alternate personality may have its own distinctive way of talking.

And Willie Stark also hears voices. He says, “But there comes a minute when it is quiet and he can hear those voices he carried away in his ears a long time back. He can make out what they say, and they say: Come back. They say: Come back, boy. So he comes back” (2, p. 17). (It may be suggestive of multiple personality that he speaks of himself in the third person.)

Ordinarily, I would interpret the kind of thing Stark says as a metaphorical way of explaining why, that day, he was on his way to visit his childhood home. But when you interpret something, you must consider the source. And the author of this novel—like most poets, novelists, and other normal people with multiple personality trait—actually heard voices. So when one of his characters says he hears voices, I take the character at his word.

1. Gloria L. Cronin, Ben Siegel (Editors). Conversations with Robert Penn Warren. Jackson, University Press of Mississippi, 2005.

2. Robert Penn Warren. All the King’s Men [1946]. New York, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1996.